Hyperborian Dub

The cultural marketplace has been stirred by a digital fever over the past few years, creating speculative bubbles that put to shame the Dutch tulip craze of the 17th century. Bullish traders place bets on unproven stocks, and talk them up before exiting, leaving the suckers who come behind with little to show for, little is lost nevertheless- usually a few embarrassing mega in the corner of a hard drive, a nocturnal zoetrope of shows soon to be forgotten.

Schooled as we are in the elementary principles of good economics, which taught us to administer our opportunity costs carefully, and always focus on the fundamentals, we strive for the slowly precipitating wisdom of beardom. These are the things that we ponder on while we hibernate in the dry deepness of a secret cave, while the skeletal fingers of winter strangle the world outside.

Archers by the Sea’s Self-titled album, which was released by LA Station Radar last week (go get) describes a Herzogian rescue mission after explorers stranded in the vast taiga that stretches between an ocean of ambient ice and mountains of folk tranquillity, we follow their faint track in silence, past abandoned utensils and futile maps, through a featureless dronescape signposted by corpses scattered like rodinesque statues in the opulent halls of an alien palace. As the album bites its tail in contemplative beauty, we reach the last survivor, kneeling in frozen worship at the feet of a crystal altar, whence raises a flower of impossible paleness.

Werner Herzog himself describes nature as war, something that will eat you. This view was reflected in an article about whether animals have faces, apropos of the recent shark attacks in the Red Sea. The answer is no, they don’t, at least not in the way in which human faces are faces. Because the soul they mirror is one which is closed to us, one with its own hermetic obsessions and lusts.

With its own raptures also, raptures like that this Narwhal song portrays: a magnificent castle of coral overlooking an unfathomable abyssal pit, endpoint of an underwater pilgrimage of sleek submariners, beginning of a kaleidoscopic rave illuminated by the emerald strobe of sunlight refracting across leagues of tropical water.